Job prospects still grim for law school grads

It might be April Fool’s Day, but the grim job outlook for recent law school graduates is no joke.

For the second time ever, the American Bar Association (ABA) has released a tally of the previous year’s graduates who have landed full-time, long-term jobs as lawyers. (The ABA defines long-term as longer than one year.) Up until 2011, the ABA only required law schools to report general data about their grads’ employment status. Last year was the first time law schools had to report specific employment data.

According to the ABA’s report, just 56.2 percent of grads from the class of 2012 secured long-term, full-time positions that required bar passage. This compares with 54.9 percent of 2011 grads who were able to land such jobs.

The ABA’s report comes just one day after a court rejected an appeal from a group of New York Law School grads who sued their alma mater for allegedly misleading them about their post-graduation job prospects.

According to the ABA, the percentage of grads who reported that they were unemployed and still seeking employment increased 1.4 percent from 2011, from 9.2 percent to 10.6 percent.

Click here for more 2012 law graduate employment data from the ABA. To view data from individual law schools, click here.